The iOS app A Beautiful Mess suffered a true attack of the clones.

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The app had only been out three months, and already the creators of A Beautiful Mess were scrambling to deal with a big problem: clones, copycats, and rip-offs, as many as seven of them, crowding the search results in the App Store. The clones appeared to be legitimate, affiliated versions, yet as all the developers knew, they were anything but. The CEO of the company that created the original A Beautiful Mess called them “infuriating.”

Attack of the clones

The legitimate version of the app is a product of the lifestyle blog A Beautiful Mess; it allows users to augment photos or background patterns with text, doodles, and filters. The app was launched by Red Velvet Art LLC, which was affiliated with the blog, and it was developed by Rocket Mobile, a brand agency based in Austin, Texas. The app launched on May 14 and debuted as the number three paid app in the App Store. Shortly thereafter, it moved to the number one spot.

A Beautiful Mess lets you do things like this to photos of your cats, as well as photos of other things.

In June, the first clone appeared. It used the same icon and screenshots as A Beautiful Mess but came with a modified name: A Beautiful Mess Free. The second clone was produced by a developer named John Harlampa: A Beautiful Mess Plus. By the beginning of August, seven clones cluttered up the App Store, and one rip-off was charting in the top 50, according to AppTweak. It hovered in that range until the day it was pulled, sometime on August 19.

The original app, which had sustained a fairly high position on the paid charts, dropped as low as the fifties.

A Beautiful Mess developers tried to have the clones removed. “When we reported an IP infringement through Apple's system, [Apple] would e-mail the company we were accusing and CC us on it,” said Trey George, the business development manager for A Beautiful Mess, in an e-mail to Ars. George believed that most of the clones originated with two operations, which he believed would feign innocence when confronted in a bid to buy time.

“They replied essentially saying, 'Sorry for the mistake. We'll look into this and try to get it handled,'" said George. "Sorry for the mistake? They accidentally copied and pasted our exact icon and app name?”

Enlarge/ One of these things is not like the other. That is, it's the real deal.

"The crazy part was there wasn't much legally we could do," George added. "Our lawyer essentially said it would be insanely expensive to pursue, and ultimately legal fees wouldn't pay for themselves."

Eric Clymer, a partner and the lead mobile developer at Rocket Mobile, speculated that a clone creator once stalled a takedown by pretending that the similarities were a mix-up—and other clone creators saw that the clone had stayed up and adopted the tactic. The copycats were looking to “wait it out to get that first check from Apple and then they don’t really care,” Clymer told Ars in an interview.

There is a time delay on the order of weeks between app purchases and when Apple issues checks to the developers, but even a few hundred purchases (plus the associated ad impressions) can be a decent chunk of money. If clones achieve a position as high as Harlampa's A Beautiful Mess Plus, they could well make more. Apple does not reveal how it constructs its app charts, and it did not respond to requests for comment.

How to build a clone

Cloning an app from the version released on the App Store is not a trivial matter. Those involved with A Beautiful Mess couldn’t speak to how it was accomplished, but the basic process involves using a jailbroken device and manually decrypting the app with different approaches depending on whether the app supports multiple architectures. More recent apps use address space layout randomization (ASLR), requiring extra steps to get access to the unencrypted binary.

“No one understood how easily the code was copyable as well,” Clymer said.

Once would-be cloners have the binary, they can modify it and resubmit it to the App Store but not under the same name. Apple does do a quick check during initial submissions to prevent duplicate names; for instance, if someone tried to submit an app named “Instagram,” the form would return an error.

Enlarge/ Inside the app, one of the clones, A Beautiful Mess Express, middle, clearly copped the design and feel of the original app. A Beautiful Mess + by Kim Tools, right, is not at all similar, but it still piggybacked off the original app with its icon, description, and name.

The clone creators circumvented this problem by positioning their apps as permutations of the original A Beautiful Mess—A Beautiful Mess Free, A Beautiful Mess +, A Beautiful Mess Express. The apps were filed under different developer names but used the same icon and augmented their pricing structures to reflect the position the name suggested. The original was $0.99; clones would be free or more expensive, depending on their modifiers.

“I imagine I can’t enter Instagram Plus, and I can’t enter Instagram Free,” Clymer said. Perhaps if the app had been around longer, Apple would have banned name permutations, but in this case, it did not do so.

I downloaded a couple of the clone apps to see how egregious the copies were. A Beautiful Mess Express, credited to developer Jingjing Liu, was a near-direct copy of the app, with a few different artistic elements changed and a banner ad added to the top of the screen.

Which of these Beautiful Messes is actually the Beautiful Mess?

Another developer looking to ape A Beautiful Mess’s success, Kim Tools, positioned its app as A Beautiful Mess +. While the app shared the icon and name, it was an entirely different app on the inside, though it was still geared toward taking and modifying photos. Both apps, present on the store along with a few others in mid-August, have since been removed. Kim Tools associated itself with the Web address xtremeapps.com, which is registered to a Lee Heineman of Pennsylvania; neither phone calls nor e-mails to the number and address provided for the Web address received a response.

Killing the clones

Since the clones hit their peak population in mid-August, all of them have disappeared from the store. Scott Wiskus, a partner and CEO at Rocket Mobile, told Ars that “within a couple days of the clones being removed, the app went from 50-something to 20-something—so it certainly made a difference.”

The story is hardly a stirring vote of confidence in Apple’s review process, but Android's lack of strong oversight can lead to an even worse problem. Clymer highlighted the recent case of the game Gentlemen!, which was purchased legitimately 144 times and pirated more than 50,000 times.

Try as I did, I could trace only one of the app clones to a human; the rest were filed under names and companies I couldn’t connect to any real person or business entity. A couple developers, such as Jingjing Liu, maintain a handful of other apps on the App Store, some of which are modeled less obviously after the popular photo-mod app InstaCollage. Kim Tools’ catalog of App Store apps are less of a ripoff, if still derivative. While it’s surprising they aren’t gone, I imagine Apple is now watching them closely.

As an App Store Developer who has been affected by this with our app Chameleon Clock, I'd just like to make a few of points...

1) This practice seems endemic - they don't just rip off big successful apps, even small developers like ourselves get targeted... I know there's a perception that App developers are all raking it in but this certainly isn't the case - the vast majority barely break even and if, miracle of miracles, the press start to write about your app the very last thing you want is for potential buyers to buy a shoddy knock off instead...

2) Apple must be swamped with this kind of thing and dealing with it is frustrating... I suppose from their point of view, for every genuine case that's bought to their attention there's a dozen 'but he said/she said' arguments that they just haven't got the time to get involved in, so they hope that 3rd parties will be able to sort it out themselves...

3) But if you take the time to explain everything to them, they do eventually step up and do the right thing - at least they did in our case. In fact, we pointed out the other developer's shameless behaviour and Apple pulled all their apps.

If you're interested in reading about my case there's a couple of blog entries that detail it all including our email to Apple that seemed to get results:

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Casey Johnston
Casey Johnston is the former Culture Editor at Ars Technica, and now does the occasional freelance story. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Applied Physics. Twitter@caseyjohnston